published on February 16, 2026 in devlog
Michi talks about a recent wave of multi/spam accounts used to interfere with planetary elections.
Michi (molp)
I spent way more time doing support work than I would have liked.
Unfortunately, Microsoft still hasn't unblocked our email provider, and we still cannot send emails to players with Microsoft domains like hotmail.com, outlook.com, live.com and so on. This is especially bad for new players, as new accounts need to confirm their email address with a confirmation code sent to their email.. Some players wrote to our support address, and I sent them the link for the account confirmation in return. The by far larger part of the affected players are the ones that don't get in touch. To reach them, Martin compiles me a list of bounced (not delivered) emails every day or so, and I go through it, looking for emails with the account confirmation link. I then send out the confirmation links manually. Although I can send them out in batch, tt is a cumbersome process that eats away my time, but necessary until we are finally unblocked and the automated systems can take over again.
Then, there is the Promitor/Avalon election drama. From what I've heard, the elections are regarded as historic, as they might shape the policy of the Hortus system and the Insitor region. It seems some interest groups are using unfair (and forbidden) measures to gain votes: We noticed that a few days ago, many new accounts and companies were found with the sole purpose of gaining a voting right in the elections. I deleted them all. Then a second wave of automatically created accounts trickled in over the weekend. A few moments ago we deleted 126 accounts. During the deletion process, votes are deleted as well, so I hope the damage done is minimal. Finally, I received a message that someone offered real money for other players to vote in their interest. I would like to take the opportunity to point out the rules of Prosperous Universe:
- One account per person: This means no account sharing and no multi-accounts. Especially no spam accounts
- Humans only: The creation of the recent spam accounts seems to be automated, we cannot tolerate that
- No real money trading: It is not permitted to pay another player in real-world money for actions they take in the game. That includes voting!
We will continue to delete accounts that don't follow these rules.
The overall performance of the game has been degraded over the last week. I noticed that the leaderboards are at least partially contributing to that. Today I patched them so that they use less memory and perform most of the actions asynchronously, meaning that even if they are slow at times, they don't block other game entities. There is still a larger issue buried inside the code of the leaderboards, but that is a task for another day. I hope today's changes will make the situation at least a bit better.
As always, we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!
Happy trading!